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Sunday, December 30, 2012

`More Entertaining Than He Was Serious'

“Slant”
conjures Dickinson; “madding,” Gray. “Fruitfulness” and “clammy” are forever Keats’.
The personal stamp of some poets is so indelible, so poetically DNA-specific,
as to lay claim not only to stanzas, lines and phrases but individual words.
Perhaps this is the ultimate memorability, to wield a word so forcefully that
readers, centuries later, recognize its ownership. One can hardly imagine this
happening today, as Joseph Epstein suggests in his review of a new book about
Yip Harburg:

“I
wouldn't be the first critic to say that the real American poets of the past
century were our lyricists. If memorability be the standard, they defeat the
poets resoundingly. I walk the streets with dozens of song lyrics in my head
and, with the exception of the verse of Philip Larkin, not a single line from a
poem written after 1960. Which makes one wonder, in the realm of creative
fantasy, if it would have been better to write `Over the Rainbow’ than `The
Waste Land’ or `It's Only a Paper Moon’ than `Sunday Morning.’”

My
father-in-law attended St. Andrew’s College in Ontario, Canada’s largest
all-boys boarding school. His bookshelves in the basement hold a dozen volumes,
all published by Oxford University Press, he was awarded as academic prizes.
Among them is The Oxford Book of English
Verse 1250-1918, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. First published in
1900, this edition dates from 1949. The paper is translucent onion-skin. And the
cover is leather. A bookplate at the front says J.M.P. Wood won the “Writing
and Spelling Prize, Lower School,” in “A.D. MCMLI.”

One can
quibble with the selection. Quiller-Couch devotes twenty-two and a half pages to
five poems by Matthew Arnold, but leaves out “Dover Beach.” He includes two
poems by Dr. Johnson, neither of them “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Donne gets
three pages, Herbert four. But I’m struck by the number of poems Quiller-Couch
includes that I hold in memory. Not every line, but rhythmic fragments, starting
with the first in the collection, “Cuckoo Song,” by the prolific Anonymous
(with parodic assistance from Ezra Pound). And John Masefield’s “Captain Stratton’s Fancy,” with these familiar lines:

“Oh, some
are fond of red wine and some are fond of white,

And some
are all for dancing by the pale moonlight,

But rum
alone's the tipple and the heart's delight

Of the
old, bold mate of Henry Morgan.”

Before I
read the poem again, I couldn’t have given you more than “rum alone’s the
tipple,” but that would have been sufficient. And there’s Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” which stirred me as a boy and still stirs me:

“Sunset
and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I
put out to sea.”

Epstein
tactfully describes Harburg’s politics as “sentimental leftism.” In fact, when
it came to politics, the lyricist was downright stupid. But I can recall and sing,
without straining, six or eight of his songs, just as I know lyrics by Kipling
and Masefield. Epstein writes:

“Art
anchored in politics is almost always art condemned to early demise. And so
should Yip Harburg's less ambitious art have been, except for his great good
luck in having been far more entertaining than he was serious.”